Gods Will Bleed ━ Legolas Greenleaf

01 ━ ÎLA: MAY IT ALL BURN.

GODS WILL BLEED.
( lord of the rings. )
01. MAY IT ALL BURN.

TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of blood, death, and violence with graphic scenes.

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YEARS HAVE PASSED, COME and gone and yet, Îla swears she can still hear the screams... still feel the fire.

She relives destruction every night; sees it in the torment of dreams, as if it could have happened only days before. But, time has softened the memory and most things have faded out of focus. For, in truth, countless years have passed since the ruination of Îla's nameless home and of her nameless people.

Yet, nothing haunts her more clearly than the fumes; from the scent of burning homes, to the smoke as it wrapped its hands around her throat, and the cries— oh, those horrible cries. Îla had been too young to understand what was happening, but that was no prerequisite for the fear to take hold. Its presence was palpable.

It clung to everything that moved and since the world seemed to be in constant motion around her, it clung to that too.

But, it did not cling to the girl, too weary for fright, for her tears were not yet ready to salt the earth. Îla stood, still as stone among the desolation of a once-small village, and if time had worn away at her memory, it left one part untouched. The vision of those valiant soldiers.

  Heroes of men.

Adorned in armour of red and black, they swept into the fray of smoke and unforgiving flame. She could still remember the symbols marked across their chests; the people of a land and sea not yet known to her. Shadowed by the night and the turmoil around them, she watched in a suffocated delirium as they stole away with bundles and smaller children.

Saviours of the fire.

They stole away with her too, though that was never how Îla had seen it— never how she'd been taught to see it. Îla was saved from a poor village, overlooked by the kingdom of Gondor, but not by the people of Rhûn. When the men of the East came to offer their aid in return for her village's loyalty, the villagers had rejected it with a violence and sure chaos had ensued.

Her home burned as a result of the selfishness of man. When the civilians had fled, or were slain in a battle of their own making, they left behind all that they knew. Even their own children. The warriors of Rhûn had saved her from a bitter life of selfish thought. A life where all that lay ahead of her were poverty and death.

Îla could not have been more indebted to them.

And so she grew among a secluded and civilized village across the sea. It was there in Rhûn that she was taught to learn languages, foreign to her native tongue. Îla learned and learned until the last traces of her people were all but dead and gone.